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This research seeks to understand how Québec governments have constructed the relation between national identity and cultural diversity from the 1960s’ Quiet Revolution to the 2010s by analyzing the discursive and historical dynamics that have shaped Québec identity politics in this period. First, it clarifies how national identity and cultural diversity are symbolically constructed in relation to one another by analyzing three key discursive lenses that have shaped the construction of national identity and cultural diversity in Québec since the Quiet Revolution, namely nationalism, pluralism, and secularism. These lenses offer different interpretations of the identity-diversity problematic, suggesting competing imperatives that social actors must balance against one another when constructing the relation between national identity and cultural diversity. Second, this research examines how state actors in Québec have mobilized these lenses through policy initiatives and discursive strategies and tried to influence how members of their community think about national identity and respond to cultural diversity. Québec governments’ approaches to diversity management have shifted significantly in this period, from promoting the French language and intercultural integration in the mid- to late-20th century to focusing on religious difference and rigid secularism in the early 21st century. Contributors to this shift include increasing nationalist anxieties through the 1990s, followed by the reasonable accommodation debate and the Bouchard-Taylor Commission in the 2000s. This analysis highlights the challenges that sub-state nationalists face when constructing the relation between national identity and cultural diversity, including the need to manage the cultural anxieties of the majority group. / Graduate

Thesis advisor: Arthur Madigan / The human self and society in general have always been in transition and transformation. Our senses of ourselves and of our society are in dialectical relation with our sense of whether or to what degree we feel part of important dimensions such as religion and politics, which are both an expression of our identity and factors that may sometimes change our identity. In modern western society it seems that identity has shifted from what Charles Taylor calls "embeddedness" in religion to a mode of life where religion is, to a great extent, expected to be a personal matter and even a personal choice. This is not impossible to understand, and historical work shows us that there are important continuities between the modern reason that rejects religion and the religion that it rejects. In this complicated process there is no mistaking the emergence of a democratic politics that rests to a significant degree on the rational project of modernity. We might even say that the success of that politics is one of the most important signs of the success of modern reason. In any case, we see in the west the development of a political system that has made society increasingly secular and religion increasingly private. This is not the case everywhere in the world. In may other places outside the "west" religion and its expressions are more public and individuals consider religion as a significant factor in defining their self-identity. In these places, many people are found expressing and promoting an identity that they consider meaningful in a world that is not fundamentally defined--or only defined--by the sort of secular political system that restricts religious beliefs and practices to the private domain. In these places, there is somewhat less difficulty with the sort of dilemma that we find in many liberal secular parts of the modern west, where even public expressions of religious beliefs are protested or challenged even though the right to such expressions are constitutionally guaranteed for all citizens. The dialectics of religion and politics and their importance in defining human self-identity is the central domain for my research, though I need many detours into other cultural factors in order to substantiate my claims. Bouncing back and forth between western and eastern religious, philosophical, and political perspectives, I finally found some points of contacts in Charles Taylor and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. They became my focus of this research. Still, I felt it necessary to offer a preliminary account of secularism, as our present context, in order to set the background of my exploration of the works and, in some important respects, the lives of Taylor and Gandhi. Hence, my first chapter is an overview of the sources of secularism in the West and in India. The second chapter deals with the Taylorian understanding of diversity, authenticity, and holistic identity. My third chapter is on Gandhi's understanding of diversity, authenticity, and holistic identity. My fourth and final chapter brings to light my own sense of our prospects for an integral understanding of religion, politics, and self-identity within the contexts of post-religious, post-secular, and post-metaphysical thinking. While claims for secular humanism and secular politics have always been somewhat convincing to me, I was not sure why religion should be necessarily so `problematic' for such a program. In fact, the pathologies of both reason and religion have become more explicit to us today. Secularism seems to repeat the exclusivism of the anti-secular stance of some religions by becoming anti-religious itself. Indeed, among secularists and even atheists there is a general trend to consider religions as intrinsically "anti-humanistic" in nature. It is true that secular humanism has sometimes helped religions to explore how deeply "humanistic" they are at heart, in their revelations and traditions. So perhaps, it is possible to have comprehensive frames and theories of humanism and secularism from within the boundaries of religions themselves without negating or diminishing either the spiritual or the secular. A dialogue between Taylor and Gandhi can be useful for us today especially as pointers toward such a humanistic approach to self, religion and politics. This dialogue between these western and the eastern thinkers can enlarge, enrich, and enlighten each other. What we then see, on the one hand, is the limit of a purely secular politics that is lacking a proper metaphysical foundation to guarantee the religious needs of humanity; and on the other hand, we also see the hesitation and struggle of religions to accommodate the demands of secularism. In both cases, we have reason to hope for a new `metaphysics of diversity and authenticity' which in turn might validate a role for religion, and perhaps also the ethical principles that it yields. Still, this is an incomplete and inconclusive dialectic and in that sense only a contribution to ongoing debate. I thank for your attention to my narrative and my proposals. Let me conclude now, so that I can listen to your stories, because you too help me to define myself. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2013. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Philosophy.

Habermas’s work since the turn of the millennium is characterized by an increased interest in the role of religion in politics. One of the most significant theses of this so-called “religious turn” is captured by Habermas’s institutional translation proviso, which calls on citizens to participate in translating religious contributions to public dialogue into a secular language purportedly accessible to all. The purpose of this thesis is to examine the translation proviso with a view both to the political inclusion of religious citizens and to the renewal of the normative resources required for democratic self-determination. By way of a critical engagement with the work of Immanuel Kant and Charles Taylor, I argue that, despite being limited as a solution to both problems, Habermas’s institutional translation proviso is nonetheless preferable to available alternatives. To that extent, I maintain that it is an indispensable feature of democratic politics in pluralist societies.

This dissertation examines the role of religious experience in British modernist literature, arguing that a strain of modernist writing drew from different religious traditions to conceptualize and model ways of escaping the confines of the self. In distinctive yet strikingly similar ways, these writers draw from these traditions—orthodox and heterodox, eastern and western—not in an attempt to propound traditional theological ideas but to recapture a religious sensibility that extends beyond dogma or creed: a sensibility that can offer means of getting beyond the self’s limited, solipsistic, and myopic perspective. In response to the perceived decline of religion in late 19th- and early 20th-century British culture; the atomizing effects of industrial modernity; and a growing distrust, informed by contemporary psychology, of the limitations of the self and the self’s perspective, the works this dissertation examines achieve a frame of reference beyond the individual point of view through processes and practices I group under the term “unselfing.” Unselfing emerges in these works as a moral and broadly religious imperative, necessary to achieving authentic communion between people and, paradoxically, to achieving a more authentic relationship to the self; at the same time, these works represent unselfing as an endeavor that is necessarily asymptotic, difficult, and always incomplete. They model unselfing in and through literary form, not only conveying but also embodying processes of unselfing in their formal experimentation. Reading works by D.H. Lawrence, E.M. Forster, Dorothy Richardson, and T.S. Eliot alongside contemporary psychological, philosophical, and anthropological writings of the period, I show how a pervasive and urgent desire to use spiritual practices to escape the self shaped the development of British modernist literature. Modernist Unselfing thus challenges prevailing accounts of British modernism, according to which secular artistic innovation absorbed and attained the sacred value formerly located in religion. I argue that, on the contrary, these narrow accounts of secularization and aestheticization have obscured what much of modernist experimentation was actively attempting to capture: a desire, often ethically-minded, to forego self.

This dissertation argues that a particular—and often overlooked—strand of natural law theory played an essential role in arguments for the secularization of political power in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Between the start of the Protestant Reformation (1517) and the English Restoration (1660), European conceptions of political and legal authority underwent a series of sweeping changes. Among the most drastic of these changes was the secularization of the idea of civil authority, which consisted of three developments. First, the legitimacy of civil sovereigns was no longer dependent on religious qualifications. Heretics and pagans could hold legitimate civil authority over Christian subjects. Second, civil authority came to be seen as the product of human agency rather than divine will alone. Kings were placed on their thrones by their subjects and were thus accountable to the communities they governed. Third, civil jurisdiction was limited to the pursuit and enforcement of temporal goods: civil peace, personal security, and the public virtues necessary for these ends. Civil sovereigns no longer had the right to determine citizens’ religious, spiritual, or supernatural obligations. My dissertation demonstrates that these three developments were made possible by the philosophical framework of natural law, which was deployed by both Catholic and Protestant political thinkers of this period.

O movimento ambientalista tem como um dos seus aspectos mais evidentes uma certa mística ou espiritualidade particular que tende a ser qualificada como \"ecológica\". Esta, por uma questão de filiação histórica, também se revela nos valores e pressupostos teóricos e práticos de algumas correntes da educação ambiental (EA), que na sua maior parte se constituíram no contexto anglosaxônico antes de se tornarem conhecidas em outros países. De maneira mais específica, contudo, no que tange ao campo da produção de conhecimento (meio acadêmico) da EA brasileira, enquanto temática central a dimensão da espiritualidade não tem merecido a mesma atenção que outras dimensões, como a política e a social. Esta tese, motivada pelo incômodo provocado por essa \"área de silêncio\", procurou refletir sobre o lugar da espiritualidade na educação ambiental, seus limites e possibilidades, fundamentando-se na problematização de três questões: (1) o conceito contemporâneo de espiritualidade; (2) o lugar da espiritualidade na educação; (3) a importância ancestral da natureza como fonte para a espiritualidade. Na primeira questão o objetivo foi: demarcar o significado que o termo espiritualidade tende a assumir atualmente, diferenciando-o de religião/religiosidade; discutir o conceito de espiritualidade laica ou imanente, conforme desenvolvido por alguns filósofos contemporâneos, e as noções de transcendência horizontal e imanência do sagrado, que sem negar a espiritualidade identificam-na como uma metadimensão da condição humana que pode ser cultivada a partir de perspectivas tanto seculares quanto místico-religiosas. Na segunda questão o objetivo foi: discutir um dos dilemas da educação moderna, que se vê pressionada entre o proselitismo religioso e o secularismo empobrecido, discutindo a possibilidade de uma educação do espírito que, através de valores laicos importantes para a coexistência e diálogo humano, reconheça a importância da busca (secular ou religiosa) pelo sagrado; apresentar os pressupostos da Educação Holística; discutir a importância da relação mestre-aprendiz em todo processo educativo e em particular no contexto de uma educação do espírito. Na terceira questão o objetivo foi: problematizar a dicotomia que opõe natureza sacralizada/dessacralizada no mundo moderno; discutir a espiritualidade do movimento ambientalista e em particular da Ecologia Profunda; apresentar propostas de religiosidades planetárias laicas; problematizar as condições para que religiosidades ecológicas se estabeleçam no cenário contemporâneo. Finalmente, no quarto capítulo, a partir das fundamentações anteriores e numa inflexão mais autoral, buscou-se: (1) problematizar a \"ausência em termos\" da espiritualidade e do sagrado nas pesquisas em educação ambiental no Brasil, considerando como hipóteses explicativas (a) a indiferença do meio acadêmico ao campo da espiritualidade, em parte por esta ainda ser associada às religiões organizadas e práticas neo-esotéricas no estilo Nova Era, e (b) à crescente influência da macrotendência crítica da EA, que ao enfatizar corretamente a importância das dimensões político-social para a práxis do campo, tendem a desconsiderar outras dimensões e em particular a da espiritualidade/sagrado, que por sua vez é relevante entre as correntes consideradas conservadoras; (2) sugerir alguns pontos fundamentais de convergência entre a noção de espiritualidade laica e as questões e temas da educação ambiental, elaborando-os a fim de discutir a vocação espiritual da EA e seu potencial \"iniciático\", na medida em que é capaz de desvelar elementos para uma transcendência imanente. Como conclusão, é discutida a relevância de uma educação ambiental que também valorize a dimensão espiritual no atual contexto de crescentes incertezas desse mundo reduzido que parece se tornar a marca do Antropoceno. / The environmental movement has as one of its most evident facets a certain mystique or particular spirituality which usually tends to be characterised as \"green\". Thus, as matter of historical association, this distinctive feature is also present in the standards as well as in the theoretical and practical assumptions of some current environmental education (EE) practices, which firstly shaped the Anglo-Saxon context before becoming known in other countries. More specifically, however, with respect to the academic mileu of the Brazilian EE, as a central theme the dimension of spirituality has not received the same attention as other dimensions, such as the political and the social. Motivated by this fact this thesis sought to examine the place of spirituality in environmental education, including its limits and possibilities. To achieve this aim, this thesis is supported by three guiding objectives as follows: (1) the contemporary concept of spirituality; (2) the place of spirituality in education; (3) the ancestral importance of nature as a source for spirituality. In the first objective the aim was to determine the current meaning carried by the term spirituality, focusing on differentiating it from religion and/or religiosity; this is followed by the introduction and discussion of the concept of secular or immanent spirituality as developed by some contemporary philosophers, as well as the horizontal transcendence and sacred immanence, wich without denying the role of spirituality identify it as a meta-dimension of the human condition that can be grown from both secular and mystical-religious perspectives. The second objective sought to discuss one of the dilemmas present in contemporary education, embodied by the contrast between religious proselytism and the impoverished secularism. This section also argues for the possibility of an education of the spirit which, through important secular values for coexistence and human dialogue, recognises the relevance of the individual search of both the secular or religious sacred practices. Within the second objective, this thesis then explores the assumptions of the Holistic Education examining the importance of the master-disciple relationship in any educational process, and in the context of an education of the spirit in particular. The aim of the third objective was to shed light on the dichotomy which opposes sacralised/desecrated facets of the nature in the contemporary world. The third objective also aims to discuss the spirituality of the environmental movement and of the Deep Ecology in particular; to examine current proposals of a secular planetary religiosity; and to further explore the conditions enabling ecological religiosities to be established in the contemporary society. Lastly, in the fourth chapter draws from the earlier theoretical foundations focusing on a more authorial inflection in order to: (1) discuss the \"absence in terms\" of spirituality and the sacred in research in environmental education in Brazil, considering as explanatory hypotheses (a) the indifference from academia to the field of spirituality, partly explained by the latter being often associated with organized religions and neo-esoteric practices commonly known as New Age, and (b) the growing influence of the EE macro-critical tendency, which properly emphasizes the importance of the political and social dimensions in the everyday practice but tend to ignore other dimensions, in particular the spiritual/sacred, which in turn is relevant among the conservative camps; (2) suggest fundamental points of convergence between the notion of lay spirituality and the issues and themes directly related to environmental education, focussing on the discussion of the EE spiritual vocation and its initiatory potential, in that it is able to reveal elements to an immanent transcendence. In conclusion, we discuss the importance of an environmental education that also values the spiritual dimension in the current context of increasing uncertainty which is part of the current dwindling social practices that seems to become the hallmark of the Anthropocene.

This is a study of the identities and political mobilisation of the Lebanese Shiʿa throughout the modern history of Lebanon. Currently, the dominant paradigms for such studies focus on the question of sectarianism in Lebanon and the corresponding Shiʿi political movements, Amal and Hizbullah. This thesis presents an alternative approach. It argues that secular identities have also been an important component of the Shiʿi community’s political mobilisation. This is explored through an analysis of the relationship between the Lebanese Communist Party (LCP) and the communist Shiʿa. Drawing on interviews with senior LCP officials, current and former Shiʿi communists, party documents and additional interview evidence from the documentary film, We Were Communists, this thesis examines the origins, evolution and transformation of the relationship between the LCP and the Shiʿa after Lebanese independence in 1943, until the end of the Lebanese Civil War in 1990. Utilising the concepts of identity and political mobilisation, this thesis develops a hybridised approach to the study of political identity that combines primordial with constructionist readings of identity. This acknowledges the presence of a repertoire of multiple and varied identities among any individual or group, and their potential for mobilisation. Rather than assuming the domineering influence of primordial sentiments, such as sectarian identity, the hybridised approach requires an analysis of the conditions under which a particular identity becomes the basis for political mobilisation. In the aftermath of Lebanese independence in 1943, the Shiʿi community’s political mobilisation was characterised by a politics of resistance. This was a product of the legacy of the Shiʿi community’s experience of the French Mandate (1920-1943), as well as the newly reformulated confessional political system that was established by the National Pact (1943). The net effect of these processes was the marginalisation of the Shiʿa. The LCP, as a prominent anti-system opposition movement in Lebanon at this time, became the Shiʿi community’s main vehicle for the mobilisation and development of their resistance identity. During the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990) the relationship between communism and the Shiʿa transformed as the LCP went into decline and new Shiʿi political actors emerged. The mantle of the Shiʿi community’s resistance identity became subject to the tensions between communism and communalism within the community. In the end, the Shiʿi community’s resistance identity was adopted and repackaged by Hizbullah, under whose auspices it remains today. The Shiʿi-communist relationship constitutes the Shiʿi community’s first engagement with formal, party-based and ideologically driven political mobilisation in Lebanon. The impact and legacy of the LCP’s influence on the Shiʿa in these terms encompasses not just the communist Shiʿa, but every other political actor in the community. Concern over the growing influence of communism led directly to the political mobilisation of the previously quietist Shiʿi religious clerics. This outcome is represented by the arrival of Imam Musa al-Sadr to Lebanon in 1959 and his stated goal of combatting the influence of communism among the Shiʿa. This thesis is an important addendum to the current understanding of the origins of Shiʿi political mobilisation, which erroneously place Musa al-Sadr at the beginning of that process. This study’s emphasis on alternative, non-sectarian forms of political identity is also a reminder of the Shiʿi community’s political diversity at a time when critical voices, resentful of Hizbullah’s and Amal’s monopoly, are currently emerging from within the ShiʿI community.

Theorized links between science and secularism are prevalent in classic sociological thought. More recently, scholars have critiqued these frameworks as oversimplified and empirically untenable. In response to such criticisms, contemporary researchers typically overlook or actively argue against links between science and secularism. This study analyzes data from a random, national survey of adults to examine the empirical connections between perceptions of science and secular identities in the United States. Analyses demonstrate that perceptions of science correlate strongly with American secularism, particularly among atheists and agnostics. Additionally, politicized views of science help account for the previously documented relationship between political and secular identities in the United States. A perspective drawing on the sociology of culture and perceived knowledge provides a more useful framework for understanding these patterns than theories of secularization.

Approximately 600 people from across Europe have officially joined Santo Daime, a Brazilian religion organized around the ingestion of a potent psychoactive beverage called ayahuasca. Santo Daime members (called fardados) regularly attend ceremonies where they imbibe ayahuasca while meditating, singing, and dancing for between 6 and 12 hours. Deeming ayahuasca a dangerous “hallucinogen,” most European governments have responded by arresting and prosecuting people who engage in Santo Daime rituals. Highlighting Belgium as a cultural bellwether of Europe, this dissertation pursues the following question: Residing within a social milieu that is dominated by secularism and mainstream Christianity, why are some Europeans adopting Santo Daime spiritual practices? The “secular” designates those aspects of social life that do not involve any recourse to supernatural entities. Through the latter half of the 20th century, most social scientists welcomed progressive secularization as an inevitable substitute for declining religions in Europe. Recently, a budding anthropology of secularism has emphasized how the institutionalization of materialist disenchantment tends to exclude alternative ideas about the nature of mind and reality. Conversions to transnational religions portend deeper shifts in how some Europeans are adapting to an increasingly interconnected world. The clarification of this process is important because scholars have yet to account for why some Westerners are making unorthodox religious choices in the age of secularization. During fieldwork, I asked informants why they had become fardados. The collective responses are summarized by one Belgian fardado who said: “Santo Daime is the key to a lot of solutions.” Fardados consider ayahuasca as a medicinal sacrament (or “entheogen”), which helps them to cure various maladies, such as depression, social anxiety, and alcohol/drug dependence. My informants’ understand their Daime practice as a form of mysticism, whereby the entheogenic ritual acts as a kind of introspective technology (what I term a “suiscope”). Empirical studies corroborate fardados’ claim that ayahuasca is benign and can be beneficial when employed in ritual contexts. One of the essential functions of anthropology is to render different cultural logics as mutually explicable. Accordingly, this dissertation endeavors to intercede in a misunderstanding between a secular hegemony and an unfamiliar religious subculture. / acase@tulane.edu